UGO RONDINONE

Born in 1964 in Brunnen, Switzerland
Lives and works in New York City, New York, USA
and Zürich, Switzerland

Since the eighties, Ugo Rondinone has been working with a various range of media, exploring the psychological and emotional impact of simple and often banal elements of everyday life. His work plays on the boundaries between fiction and reality. Shaped as carefully constructed environments, and variously incorporating illusory and architectural devices such as coloured light and sound, mirrors, false walls and floors, windows and mazes, his installations envelop the viewer, suggesting that all is not quite as it seems. Since the mid-nineties, the artist has created mesmerizing out-of-focus circular pictures that give a specific atmosphere, recalling the trance-inducing images of the sixties’ psychædelia. In reference to Jasper Johns’ Targets and sixties’ Op Art pictures, Rondinone’s target paintings project a fresh, contemporary aesthetic through his use of brightly coloured spray paint, designing concentric rings with a smooth, blurred finish. A deep, hypnotizing, visual well, the work seems to pulsate and threatens to swallow its viewers, both attracting and engaging them.